OSS 117: From Africa with Love (2021)

Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath returns to the screen in 1981, dispatched to an unnamed African nation to locate a missing colleague and to shore up French interests against the encroaching Soviet influence. Nicolas Bedos takes the helm from Michel Hazanavicius and keeps the machinery intact: Jean Dujardin plays a vain, dim, casually bigoted secret agent whose every confident pronouncement collapses under its own stupidity. The joke has always been that the man is a relic, and the film lets him be one.

That said, the African setting supplies a cast of Black performers with substantial screen time, Fatou N'Diaye foremost among them as Zéphyrine, the president's wife and a rebel leader with a coherent critique of her husband's greed. Her arguments about corruption and inequality land. The film also allows its hero's colonial reflexes to be the punchline, which flatters the audience for noticing what he cannot. This is not the same as a contemporary social program. The representation arrives through geography, the politics through plot mechanics, and the chauvinism is mocked because it is funny to mock it.

Elsewhere the cupboard is bare. There is no romantic subplot that bends toward any modern understanding of desire, no interest in bodies or brains outside the narrow band the genre allows, and not a whisper about the climate. Arms dealers and a venal president take their knocks, but the target is corruption, not capital itself. Bedos sermonizes to nobody. He simply sends his idiot through a jungle of crocodiles and lets him talk. Inspectors of social virtue will find little to confiscate here, and the rest of us will find a few good laughs and a plot that runs out of road.